For the past six years, NASA has organized a worldwide 48 hour ‘hackathon’ to encourage everyone enthusiastic about space to come together to solve specific problems we face in space, and here on Earth. During the last weekend of April, over 25,000 participants, in 187 locations, in 69 countries participated in the 2017 Space Apps Challenge.

Among the five winning teams that were chosen, the HALA team from Ivanovo, Russia received the award for Best Use of Hardware. Three members of the all-star winning HALA team are also Akvelon employees; Dmitrii Smirnov, Danila Shutov, and Ipatov Maxim.

“The purpose of our work on this hackathon was to create an adaptation for demonstrating the Earth’s statistical data by a holographic method in 3D,” explained HALA team lead and Akvelon employee, Dmitrii Smirnov, on their Space Apps project page.

The project was developed and assembled by the team in the two days of the Space Apps Challenge, it displays collected weather data from anywhere in the world via satellites, meteorological stations, and space observing centers. Then, the collected data is analyzed, processed, and broadcast to the holographic model of the Earth in different colored areas based on air temperature in specific locations. The HALA team used open source data from NASA to visualize sets of information, and the Hologram can be updated in real time whenever the NASA data changes. Controlling the device is simple with an accompanying mobile application, which is a Single Pack Authorization with a dynamic layout for a mobile device.

A special feature of development is the fact that the operation of the device does not end with simply displaying weather. It can be used for demonstrations of all kinds of holographic data, as well as various kinds of animations and static objects. For example, you can create a rotating company logo or a dancing animated little man who will change his color depending on the humidity level in the room.

Speaking about the technical component of the project, the principle is based on projecting the side of the object into the plane. To do this, the team used an iPad with software they developed, a pyramid of plexiglass with facets at 45 degrees and a body to enclose the device. At the heart of the software is the Node.js, Socket.io, and Three.js stack, which helps compose the object into four planes and display them on the iPad screen. The pyramid above the iPad screen reflects the planes and the object is assembled into a hologram.

See the holographic presentation in the video below or in person at CloudExpo.

Manage Your Smart Home From The Cloud!

07 Jun Manage Your Smart Home From The Cloud!

Home Management Automation is huge in today’s busy world. Concepts like One Touch, Checking-In On Your Home, and Virtual Home Management have become staples for our fast-paced world. So naturally, technology that can manage communication to and from devices and services seems a perfect fit for maintaining safety and smooth running of the place you go to relax and refresh! How did we develop our unique take on this exciting tech notion? Glad you asked…

Prerequisites

Windows 10 and Visual Studio 2015 (Community, Professional or Enterprise) installed on Development machine.

Managing your Smart Home using Bots

Microsoft introduced the Bot Framework (part of the Cortana Intelligence Suite) a few months ago, so that everyone can easily build and connect intelligent bots to interact with your users naturally. This means the user could be anywhere, using any popular service – from text/SMS to Skype, Slack, Office 365 mail or virtually, anywhere. We believe this same approach is applicable to home automation scenarios as well. Just as you connect services and interact with other users, you can now interact and manage your Smart Home via intelligent bots.

Check out demo below:

The scenario above demonstrates a very simple case (treat it as proof-of-concept). You can also target complex and intelligent scenarios using another Cortana Intelligence Suite component called, Language Understanding Intelligent Service (LUIS). LUIS offers a fast and effective way of adding language understanding to applications by using pre-existing, world-class, already-built models from Bing and Cortana. (try examples). And when you need specialized models, LUIS guides you through the build process, in a fast and easy way!

That’s it!!! You are all set! Now, you can use your preferred client app…like Skype, Slack, etc. … on your favorite mobile or desktop platform to interact with Smart Technology in your home. Whether you are in a local network or outside and remote, you stay connected and keep your Home running the way you want.